Detroit Free Press Business Writer

Detroit Future City highlights

■ Repurpose large amounts of Detroit vacant land in distressed areas as farms, forests, rainwater-retention basins, recreation and other ecological uses. ■ Strengthen existing employment hubs and encourage entrepreneurial startups there. ■ Reshape transit networks to focus on employment hubs. Focus new development on multi-family housing rather than single-family housing. ■ Create dense walkable residential districts in parts of Detroit and innovative productive landscapes in other areas. ■ Use aggressive regulation to reinforce land redevelopment and to target blight. ■ Every neighborhood has a future, just not the same future everywhere. ■ Establish an overall Department of Neighborhoods to coordinate all renovation work. ■ Use “positive incentives” to move people from distressed neighborhoods to stronger districts. ■ Seize abandoned storefronts and move in entrepreneurs, and streamline the business licensing process. ■ Streamline demolition process and strategically target which neighborhoods get blight removal first. ■ Crack down on metal strippers and scrap yards that accept stolen items. ■ Require banks to participate in neighborhood revival by securing foreclosed properties or pay fines. ■ Reform Detroit Land Bank to make it more useful. ■ One Square Mile plan would assign one police officer per square mile of city. ■ New police/fire/EMS centers to be located in each of seven City Council districts integrated into retail community centers. ■ Promote major anchor commercial developments in each of the seven council districts, similar to the Gateway shopping center near 8 Mile and Woodward. ■ Pay for it with no new tax burden on residents, using state, federal, nonprofit and private funding sources. ■ Use eminent domain to seize houses facing foreclosure to keep residents in their homes. ■ Create a Detroit Neighborhood Partnership board consisting of leaders from business, council and nonprofit groups with mayoral oversight. ■ Accelerate Detroit Future City’s 50-year time frame into a five-year implementation period.

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In Detroit’s mayoral race, candidates Mike Duggan and Benny Napoleon each have offered outlines of how they would try to re­develop the city’s neighborhoods and rebuild its economy. But a third plan is also vying for Detroiters’ attention, and in many ways, it’s more innovative than either candidate’s approach.

That plan is Detroit Future City, the 347-page vision released in January that offers a densely detailed road map for turning the city’s liabilities — such as vacant land and empty factories — into assets.

Both candidates’ plans for neighborhood revival nod to Detroit Future City, and both Duggan and Napoleon said in interviews that Detroit Future City has informed their own work. But Robin Boyle, chairman of the department of urban planning at Wayne State University, is among the experts interviewed by the Free Press who said neither candidate goes as far as Detroit Future City in envisioning innovative strategies for turning around Detroit.

Detroit Future City, for example, calls for concentrating any new development in the city’s already more densely populated areas rather than scattering it throughout the city as often occurs today. And, most controversially, Detroit Future City advises allowing large areas of low density in distressed neighborhoods to convert to “green” uses, such as agriculture or reforestation or rainwater retention basins, rather than calling for re­development in those areas.

It’s a bold plan that recognizes the reality of little or no market demand for large swaths of Detroit vacancy. It accepts that the blank spots on Detroit’s map need to be repurposed in new and productive ways, rather than hold out hope for massive new development. But there’s little sense in either candidate’s plan that goes that far. Rather, both candidates foresee redevelopment throughout the city.

“There’s almost no sense of taking some hard decisions,” Boyle said of Napoleon and Duggan’s plans. The candidates’ plans are “littered with references to all neighborhoods will return, all business districts will be revived. … There’s almost no reference to some of the more ambitious green or landscape urbanism-type suggestions that are in Detroit Future City.”

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Detroit Future City estimates that 29% of the city’s land area one day will be given over to “landscape” uses, a combination of large parks, community gardens and farms, re­forestation, rainwater-retention ponds and other “blue” infrastructure, recreational uses and other ecological innovation areas. Another 22% would be “green” neighborhoods — areas with a significant amount of open land.

Napoleon said that he saw greening strategies as temporary solutions on the way to traditional redevelopment.

“I do agree, as we demolish significant areas of the city, that if there’s not development there, we do green it,” he said. “But to say that I envision the city being a vast farmland is not something I see down the road. I think if we are vigilant, and we have a proper vision and a proper plan, we are in the position to grow this city once again to the size that it was.”

Each candidate says he believes that better management of existing city resources will lead to success. Duggan said he will appoint a single Department of Neighborhoods to oversee all service delivery, while Napoleon said a police officer assigned to each square mile of the city will act as an ombudsman for neighborhood needs and complaints, with the mayor’s office still responsible for coordinating service delivery.

With that in mind, neither candidate likes the recent spinning off of city functions to outside nonprofit authorities and conservancies, such as what occurred with Cobo Center and Eastern Market. Nor would either support transferring many of the city’s planning department functions to the nonprofit Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, the city’s development arm.

“I don’t know how many cities have outsourced their planning department,” Duggan said. “If you’re not holding the mayor accountable for the vision of the city’s future, why are you electing a mayor?”

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But Boyle of WSU said that it’s crucial for the next mayor to understand that city government no longer plays the same dominant role that it once did.

“My biggest complaint is this assumption that a revived mayor’s office is going to be the champion of this,” Boyle said. “That flies in the face of the way the city is moving, a lighter touch with far more neighborhood organizations” taking the lead.

Meanwhile, the Detroit Future City plan, written by a team of mostly outside consultants funded by the Kresge Foundation, has been quietly moving forward toward implementation.

When released to great fanfare last January, the Detroit Future City planning effort moved under the oversight of the DEGC, headed by George Jackson. Since then, DEGC has hired Dan Kinkead, formerly an architect with Detroit-based Hamilton Anderson Associates and a co-author of Detroit Future City, to serve as director of the plan’s implementation office.

That implementation office now has about 10 employees, half of them supplied by fellowship programs run by the German Marshall Fund and the Detroit Revitalization Fellows program. Office space is being prepared for the team in the New Center area, and Kinkead said the team is working on creating various pilot programs that would demonstrate the concepts and benefits of Detroit Future City’s strategies. The Kresge Foundation and other donors are underwriting the effort.

How it all comes together following the mayoral election in November may not become clear for months or even years. But former City Council member Sheila Cockrel said both candidates ought to make maximum use of the Detroit Future City plan.

“There’s so much incredible data that has been collected and is available that can help take abstract ideas and make them workable and manageable,” she said.